According to a Computerworld article, BlackBerry is exploring putting itself up for sale, as the company falls into 4th place in the mobile market. IDC statistics that show Android leads the mobile market with nearly 80%, iOS has 13.2%, Windows Phone 3.7%, and BlackBerry 2.9%. Gartner analyst Bill Menezes states that even new ownership is "not going to address how the company restores itself."

One key asset BlackBerry owns is QNX, the real-time based OS it bought in 2010. QNX is microkernel based, versus the monolithic kernel used by many OS's like Linux. BlackBerry bases its tablet and phone OS's on QNX, which also remains a popular commercial OS for embedded systems.

True, both routes carried some risk, but I think WP was by far the least risky. They would've had an ecosystem, support from MSFT, if they went the tablet route they'd have a ready made tablet OS as well, and been probably preferred to Nokia for enterprise deployments.

By no means a guarantee, but I think in hindsight they took the wrong bet. I wouldn't have minded BB10 though, so its a shame to see it going away.

An interesting question is what does BBRY do next, I think they have a decent amount of cash left, not sure off hand but they might be able to divest from handsets and focus on some niche.

Point taken. Perhaps "no doubt" and "much better" was a bit of an exaggeration but I still think it's more likely they'd been better off if backed by a major player with some serious capital and clout.